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Apple Sells A Million Songs in Debut Week
Scrameustache writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store sold over one million songs during its first week. Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, and over half of the 200,000 songs offered on the iTunes Music Store were purchased at least once.
Those new iPods are selling like hotcakes too..."
Okay, I guess over a million songs is pretty good for a new service on an obscure platform (apple :-) However, that's still only a million dollars. I thought that the recording industry was something like a 40-50 billion dollar industry. How much money would a service like this need to make because the RIAA would adopt this business strategy across the board? People used to pay $20 for a CD with 1 or 2 good songs on it, now they will pay $1-2. How can the recording industry avoid losing 80% of their income? (Until that question is answered, I don't think we will see this widely adopted.)
Another thing I find surprising is how many people are raving about the sound quality of AAC, when in my own tests it's significantly worse than MP3 encoded with LAME at the same average bitrate.
I don't mean subtly worse, either. I mean AAC is so awful you'd have to be deaf to not hear the distortion. If you want to verify for yourself, encode Fischerspooner's "Emerge", and listen to the section starting about 38 seconds in.
Yet loads of Mac users are deleting all their MP3s and re-ripping to AAC. Talk about a victory for Steve Jobs and Apple! Get everyone to put their music collection in MPEG-4 format, and you won't see them switching to Windows Media any time soon. I suspect this is a big part of the motivation behind the store, the iPod firmware update, and the new iTunes--get MPEG-4 out there before Microsoft can kill it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The parent post isn't really funny, it's actually a serious issue. Depending on how DRM is implemented, you may not be able to easily back up and restore the music from CD. Because under these models you don't have the right to freely copy the data that makes up that music.
Personally, that pisses me off because under my model I control the data that's stored on my computer.
Okay well i have to disagree that this iws very impressive. for one thing, the fact that it took them so long to reach a million downloads is practically laugahable. i'm looking at my KaZaa and apparently there are over four and a half million users currently online (in the middle of the workday). if every one of them downloaded just one song today, well i'm sure you can do the math. But more to the point, i'm not the least bit impressed with their so-called business model. it's still the same digital rights management muck that everyone else tries. worse still it's horrendously integrated into an entire product line. you're supposed to shell out for the cost of an iPod to carry them, you have to use iTunes (which frankly is not even close to the best mp3 player on the mac). OH wait. not only that, but they're only offering you some obscure new format (AAC) that they developed specifically so that they could embed DRM in every song. so now if you want other people to have the same song, you can only give it out three times before it's locked. yikes, i couldn't even give a copy to every member of my family with whom i share music? has anyone tried recording off the sound card (what you hear from it) and ripping that as an mp3?